If we assume that Sunderland acknowledges reality, this reduces to the almost trivial observation that given known biological reality the only move that saves us from racism is to assign equal goodness to all innate qualities.

YOU GUYS SEEM NOT TO KNOW WHO YOU ARE DEALING WITH TRY THIS FOR BACKGROUND
“The EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states”, the UN’s special representative for migration has said.
Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural.
He also suggested the UK government’s immigration policy had no basis in international law.
He was being quizzed by the Lords EU home affairs sub-committee which is investigating global migration.
Mr Sutherland, who is non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former chairman of oil giant BP, heads the Global Forum on Migration and Development , which brings together representatives of 160 nations to share policy ideas.
He told the House of Lords committee migration was a “crucial dynamic for economic growth” in some EU nations “however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states”.

You know sometimes I get the feeling many of you are not really against this sort of thing only that you are not directing it. Id like to know how many of you do not understand the survival of the European diaspora and its civilization is foundational to any techno future or world worth living in. Nick land wouldnt last five minutes in asia without all those nuclear ballistic missiles manned by Nebraskan farm boys aimed at china. You all would have no Iphone video games or popular media spacex the internet or suvs or the freedom to larp around on political blogs none of it without the european peoples. It may be vulgar and trigger your prog upbringing the WNs may be to yang and make your littlle tech dicks pull up but they are right about the threat and frankly therea a thousand times better chance of them triggering a race war than NRx being invited to Davos. That not to say you bright kids couldnt figure something out if you took your heads out of your asses I think frankly you need a real leader.

If no one is better than anybody else, nothing is better than anything else — the words ‘better’ and ‘worse’ mean nothing. I very much doubt that he wants to go there (even if a variety of extreme mystics and postmodernists have preceded him).

Much of postmodernism is basically about claiming that words are meaningless so this may be precisely what the author had in mind. Maybe his subconscious was telling to him that reality, like heredity, can only be truly banished from your mind if you stop thinking and stop noticing completely.

People certainly have a large amount of thinginess to them. When I am ill, the medicine and the doctors are both tools used for my healing, just the doctor can think and talk, but from my point of view they both are used for the same purpose. And accepting this is called professionalism on the doctors part, that the patient in pain is not interested in his personhood, but in how can he help him get better.

Romans called slaves talking tools, and the unthingization of people was largely introduced by Christianity, by the invention of the concept of person and personhood. Kant and the Enlightenment secularized this notion, but it was, and still is, something quasi-religious. The supernatural soul was secularized into atheistic, but still idealistic, quasi-spiritual concepts like person, autonomous individual and suchlike. This, in fact, is probably one of the major reason behind the Cathedral, i.e. why modern liberalism led to something like a form of Cryptocalvinism: they kept the idea of the soul around in the form of the quasi-spiritual, unscientific idea of the person or the autonomous individual.

From an atheistic angle, if you e.g. look at Yudkowsky and AI research, the whole ideas is that things could be made that are a lot like people. Therefore, people are not that far from things, maybe just a specific subset of things, things that think. Sophonts.

Quite frankly, if we treated people like things, of course not like common things, but in a realistic way, things with atttributes like intelligence, decision making ability and so on, but would not treat this autonomous individual personhood thing with its dignity and what not so mystically, much of Progressivism would disappear.

Realistically, we only personify people inside the Dunbar number anyway, the rest are stats, and stats are things. Since I am not in yours, feel free to treat this comment as if it was generated by some kind of a thinking machine without this mystical personhood, as a little experiment. Pretend I am Deep Blue trying to take a Turing test. What then?

Do you really think that Sutherland is referring to specific physical capacities when he uses the word “better”? That would seem strange, wouldn’t it – for somebody whose focus appears to be human rights, to be discussing the 100m sprint on his twitter account?

Do you not have an answer to my question, about what you really think Sutherland is talking about?

anon Reply:January 24th, 2016 at 1:00 pm

My immediate assumption is that by “better” he means “worth more”, since that would fit with his rights-based mandate… Do you really think that Sutherland is referring to specific physical capacities when he uses the word “better”?

Sutherland stated, “any concept of one person being better than another leads to racism.”

He universally quantified over all concepts (“any concept”) that have some sort of value property. Call this the predicate P(x) s.t. the set of P(x)’s domain is the full set of values that “better” would range over, i.e. {physical values, economic values, aesthetic values, intellectual values, moral values, legal values, …}. He is saying that P(person1) > P(person2) implies racism. There is probably a deeper formalism involving people and relational properties, but I think that captures the important part.

For you to say, “nuh uh, he’s talking about a specific member of the domain” seems like a pretty silly interpretation of the sentence when he explicitly states “any” at the start, and then explicitly ties that quantification to concepts, and further ties the concept to some evaluative property. If he wanted to be clearer, he should have restricted the domain he was ranging over.

Applying symbolic logic to everyday statements, particularly tweets, is not likely to help you understand what people are trying to say in everyday life. Meanwhile, it seems astonishingly clear what he is saying if you can be bothered to pay attention to context. In this case, the context is human rights law.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. You may disagree with the Declaration, and you may question his sincerity, but we can safely assume that Sutherland agrees with it.

Given this context, when he says “Any concept of one person being better than another,” he is most likely to be referring to “better” in terms of “equality in dignity and rights”. Does this seem a reasonable interpretation to you?

Xoth Reply:January 24th, 2016 at 8:08 pm

I view it as a motte-and-bailey argument. The motte is “equality in dignity and rights”.

merkur Reply:January 24th, 2016 at 7:12 pm

How you reached the conclusion that the context for his statement “Any concept of one person being better than another leads to racism” is “revenge for the Holocaust” is truly a mystery for the ages.

Not necessarily this guys a chairman of Goldman and one of the chief architects of white population replacement. I think its much more likely this policy makes people like him very wealthy and makes taking their power away very difficult. The left has given up on the means of production and the blue collars theres an unholy alliance between global capital and cultural marxists, that doesnt make their motivations identical.It doesnt even make the marxists true believers you think Hillary hasn’t noticed racial difference? Leftists are total racists if they were not they couldnt support there racial redistribution.The marxist also could see neutralization of the non elite whites through immigration and anarcho tyranny as a means to an end where they have a lot stupider and lower expectation populace and if with the capitalists they essentially form a one world government [yeah I said that and they are getting there]with vast intelligence and military powers whos going to stop that.Democracy is not causing this elites ignore democracy this is why the trump frustration.the Alt Reich might be vulgar and make too much of JQ but they are right to be alarmed about the existential threat to the European race.ll of the larping about techno future depends upon the survival of out race the simple fact is we are unique Jews and east asians might have higher IQs but they will never accomplish what we have and could continue to. our cognitive elites need a foundation of culture and middle class middle brow gene stock. And a large enough military that china etc remain laughable.Obviously this doesnt work in multiculturalism maybe non citizen guestworkers. There isnt much time so waiting for Gnodot is waiting for the election of the new people game over.

sure, let say, he will come to Africa and black guy will punch him in face, should he read him declaration of human rigths? this guy living in imaginary world (which does not exist) and in real world all what he get is a punch in a face.

personally, I can put it this way, I live in Africa and nobody even think punching me in a face. people here does not have high IQ but know better how to survive.

i think this is the irish guy thats a chairman of goldman and one of the architects of population replacement of whites through massive immigration, If you read his plans hes not concerned about replacing third world population demography] some of his more thought out statements are much scarier in their detail and that hes managed to make them happen. he also heads various NGOs like UN committees from which he instituts these policies. you see this is why i say civilization before capitalism, Moldbug is wrong about Fnatgl leaving us alone, and its as naive to think capitalists will make wise decisions for a hundred reasons.

“Better” & “Worse”, are without meaning, until assigned a scale of reference.
Only specification of such a scale can enable evaluation.
But it is the case, that any aggregate, or architectonic collective, of such scales of reference, would form evaluatory contexts inherently susceptible to an ineluctable play of transformation(s), such inherent ludic transformation(s) being inscribed by the very intentionality seeking to escape its destabilising, transformative play.

Scales of reference are chosen, their relative distributions & emphases of their aggregates can vary in ways so radical as to appear incommensurable, in the aggregate formations (cultures?), or sampled instances, that are generated.

The very mechanisms of adaptive efficiency promoting a continuity of survival, militate against what could be the preferred stases of monocultural stability.
Does continuity of survival, that emphasises the preferred stases of monocultural stability, lend itself to mere repetition of, & reduction to, a static, non-evolving core?
Would that really be a culture worth having?

LOL is that you Land immigration its brilliant!
However Id say either “better” or “worse” have inherent scales. its best understood as any discernment whatsoever will be interpreted as full endorsement of Nazi values.

{AK}: This isn’t clear.
No, I’m not Nick Land. He usually goes under “admin”.
No, I’m not suggesting anything, really, about immigration. Yes, the notion of “preferred stases of monocultural stability” is connected to the issue, it’s a way of considering whether the background assumptions of the Neoreaction debate, on this page & generally, are cogent or not.

[michael]: “However Id say either “better” or “worse” have inherent scales. its best understood as any discernment whatsoever will be interpreted as full endorsement of Nazi values.”

{AK}: The word, “better”, only entails increased improvement; “worse”, signifies the reverse, a decrease. Neither specify a reference. Without any reference, there is nothing to attribute any ‘improvement’, or ‘deterioration’, to. The only inherency the two words, one binary concept, have, is that of necessarily suggesting a range of qualitative magnitude(s).
Discerning the nuances of such qualitative magnitude(s), or their lack of any final theoretical limitation, over a scale of reference, does not entail a subscribing to them.

{AK}: The word, “better”, only entails increased improvement; “worse”, signifies the reverse, a decrease. Neither specify a reference. Without any reference, there is nothing to attribute any ‘improvement’, or ‘deterioration’, to.

The reference is to the object of the improvement or degradation its a built in scale was my point granted its not externally calibrated but its pretty useful since we are concerned with the object at hand and not the external. If we have a goal in mind for the object we can even use the better worse to say whether we are in relation to that goal. in the childs game hot or cold you can see how this method can be used to pinpoint accuracy.

“Applying symbolic logic to everyday statements, particularly tweets, is not likely to help you understand what people are trying to say in everyday life. Meanwhile, it seems astonishingly clear what he is saying if you can be bothered to pay attention to context. In this case, the context is human rights law.”

Actually, it does. It helps get at the underlying formalism of the statement. That was the whole aim of 21st century analytic philosophy from Frege and Russell onward up to Quine and beyond.

Even if you ignore the logical interpretation, you are still speaking about semantics, i.e. the meaning of what he said. There are three aspects of semantics: reference, sense, and some pragmatic interpersonal aspect.

The formalism helps point to what the reference is, helping the semantic understanding of the sentence. We know what he is referencing (universally quantified concepts over an entire domain of values), because it can be formalized and made explicit. If he screwed it up, that’s his fault for not making a better statement.

Sense relations (how the words fit together) can also be formalized. In fact, they are often formally done so in logic. So, really, you lose out on your understanding of meaning in language there as well.

Your narrowly focused claims about “context” ignore these two major components of finding meaning in a sentence (semantics). You’ve ignored the sub-string in the sentence about “any concept,” ignored the formalism and semantics that this entails in the scope of the entire sentence, and finally, focused on one word (“better”). You claim people here are ignoring context and background facts on one word while simultaneously ignoring the entire referential and sense relations in the sentence (and the sentence after it, see below) in light of the best tools we have for explicating meaning. Moreover, your claims about context are unsupported. Saying it is “astonishingly clear” is not helpful. You’ve given no argument that this is the case. Throughout the thread you’ve merely asserted it in a tautologous way (“better means x. Therefore, better means x”). That’s completely uninformative.

Most importantly — while simultaneously championing context — you’ve ignored the second sentence. If you are going to make appeals to context, maybe you should have read it. Immediately following the analysed sentence above, he makes reference in the same tweet to, “It is much in evidence amongst the anti immigrant cohort”. What is in evidence? The “anti-immigrant” tweeters according to other tweets. According to your interpretation, this sentence now becomes:

“Any concept of one person being better than another — where better is in terms of equality in dignity and rights — leads to racism . This state of affairs is much in evidence amongst the anti immigrant cohort.”

You say that some of the other commentators’ interpretations above don’t make any sense at all, but your interpretation is even more ludicrous, because of the second sentence. It appears he is not making an argument about human rights, but making a sociological observation about what sorts of evaluative concepts leads to racism, and derives evidence for this sociological implication from twitter and the “anti immigrant cohort.” Now, if your interpretation is correct, it means that your conception of “better” is somehow also tied to the “anti immigrant” conception of better, as that is how the sentences are set up. This doesn’t make much sense, since clearly most of them are not making references to some sort of deontological framework (most of them talk about consequences of immigration and the value of immigrants across a spectrum of value categories). Again, the universally quantified concept that I analysed it as makes a lot more sense than your narrowly based one, since Sutherland was responding to a set of people with different evaluative properties of what makes certain people better.

(BTW that was a decent rebuttal, but I hope you enjoyed writing all of that out, because it should be obvious that the troll you were responding to has no intention of engaging honestly with you. Language works differently on teh interwebz)